Bill Morrison: Selected Films 1996-2014 (E) | Home Ents Review

Dir. Bill Morrison, US, 1996-2014, circa 500 mins

The BFI’s 3-disc Blu-ray-only set of recent films by the American film maker who celebrates nitrate damage to archival found footage is for soi-disant fans of the avant-garde only. The films are undeniably striking but seen en masseas this collection allows, the techniques, the over-scored nature of the accompanying music and their sentimental affects seem pretty artificial and mannered rather than profound.

Bill Morrison is a curator of decomposed and badly damaged nitrate film stock – he arranges decaying found footage into short and feature length films. Often, there’s a documentary element to these assemblages, for example World War One, The Great Mississippi Floods of the 1920s, the early Soviet-era Jewish diaspora in the Ukraine. Over and above this documentary material, the films highlight the nitrate damage – the material decay itself becomes ‘beautiful’, both because of its transformative formal nature and because of its intervention in and links to visions of the past – that thereby become at least nostalgically tinged.

That seems to be the intention, anyway. While watching, the viewer is aware of the passage of time in several ways: the old footage, the damage, the experience of watching the damaged old footage. For me, the effect was weird and sometimes, in parts, wonderful. But the overall effect is less than the sum of these parts.

There are two problems: in a digital age, it’s hard to believe that the patterns we see are all nitrate damage – mightn’t there be some cool software involved and doesn’t that effect our perceptions of Morrison’s project? Were software to be involved, wouldn’t this turn Morrison into a film ‘designer’, the filmic equivalent of an interior designer who likes distressed wallpaper?

The second issue relates to the close relationship between images and music. Most of the films have commissioned scores by the likes of Michael Gordon, Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas and Phillip Glass. There’s also some spiritual minimalist music from Henryk Gorecki. But none of this music displays the ‘distress’ of the imagery – it’s all very well produced and sentimental in tendency, especially when sitting with ‘lost world’ footage. The effect of the music is to make the whole project appear a bit smug. Which is unfortunate.

Given the fragmented, fluctuating and repetitive nature of the techniques Morrison utilizes, narratives don’t make much of an appearance in these films, except in very short repeated sequences. The two larger exceptions are a short road movie Ghost Trip (which lacks the ‘decay effect’) and the feature-length Spark of Being, in which Morrison splices together a version of the Frankenstein story from damaged silent movie fragments – quite a feat!